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The Ad Contrarian has been on fire lately. I especially liked one of his recent posts on heavy users which I found especially insightful:

People in advertising and marketing often wrongly equate usage and loyalty. They think that heavy users in a category tend to be brand loyal. And that heavy users of a brand are brand loyal. The truth can be quite the opposite.

He goes on to give an example of a fast food patron who eats at McDonald’s 4 out of 10 times and other fast food restaurants with less frequency, making this person the “heavy” user, however, he eats at competitors the other SIX out of 10 times. Assuming that the heavy user in this example is brand loyal would be incorrect.

Success of a brand is not singularly related to high degrees of brand loyalty…the most important success factor for mainstream consumer brands is not how many loyal customers you have, but how many customers you have.

The big issue with equating heavy usage with brand loyalty is the overemphasis clients and agencies place on helping people establish “relationships” and “engaging” with brands, when in fact they are oftentimes just heavy category users with little loyalty.

Like this:

There’s an enormous gap between the number of available programming jobs and people with the computer skills to actually do the work.

“Enrollment rates in programming classes are low, but what is worse is that schools aren’t even teaching it, even though this is the fastest growing segment of jobs in the country,” Partovi said, adding that nine out of ten U.S. schools don’t offer computer programming classes at all — and those that do often treat it as an elective that doesn’t count toward graduation, the same as, say woodworking (Source: TechCrunch).

This new video from the non-profit Code.org (which aims to encourage computer science education) features an all-start cast of people with programming skills to show an accessible, human side to a typically dry subject.

In other coding news, GOOD has announced the winners of Code for GOOD. I love the whole idea behind this recruiting initiative. Participants were able to take coding lessons and submit a final project, while the finalists were flown to LA for a hack-a-thon to showcase their new skills. The winner was provided an opportunity to work for GOOD. You can watch the embedded video to learn more about the finalists.